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Split school districts now, board member advises

By Doug Snover

November 19, 2005

Tempe’s elementary and
high school districts should begin the
overdue process of breaking up the
“dinosaur” that is Tempe Union High
School District rather than wait for a
state commission to look at
redistricting statewide, longtime Tempe
Union Board member Mary Frances Lewis
says.

Lewis recently suggested
the Tempe Union, Tempe Elementary and
Kyrene school districts begin their own
study of replacing the high school
district with one or more new “unified”
districts to oversee education from
kindergarten through high school.

Under today’s system, the
Tempe Elementary and Kyrene districts
each educate students from kindergarten
through eighth grade, then turn students
over to the Tempe Union High School
District to complete their education.

Nearly all of the
freshman who enter Corona del Sol,
Marcos de Niza, Desert Vista, Mountain
Pointe, McClintock and Tempe high
schools come through the Tempe or Kyrene
elementary school systems.

Although the three
districts are on friendly terms, the two
elementary school districts operate
independently of each other, and the
high school district has no control over
how the elementary school districts
prepare students for high school.

That becomes a crucial
issue now that Arizona requires students
pass the
Arizona's Instrument to Measure
Standards (AIMS) test to graduate
from high school, Lewis said. “We have
only four years” to prepare students to
pass the AIMS test, she said.

“I think AIMS has brought
this into the forefront a little more,”
Lewis said of the need to unify the
three Tempe districts.

“I think what AIMS did is
cause a lot more questions about how we
do things and why we do things a certain
way.”

The Arizona School
District Redistricting Commission held
its first meeting on Nov. 10 to begin
studying the possibility of combining
common school districts with a union
high school district to create unified
districts in parts of the state where
there are separate elementary and high
school districts.

The goal is “to create
unified school districts that offer
instruction to students in programs for
preschool children with disabilities and
kindergarten programs and grades one
through twelve,” according to a summary
of the legislation that created the
commission earlier this year.

The new state commission
is to report its findings by the end of
2007.

“It’s going to be a long
process,” said Art Harding, the
Department of Education’s liaison to the
commission.

“It’s going to start off
a little bit slow” because the
commission needs to collect information
on the various types of school districts
throughout the state, he added.

One potential mountain
the new state commission must climb is
what to do with the Phoenix Union High
School District, which is facing the
same issues as Tempe Union but on a much
larger scale. There are 13 separate
elementary school districts preparing
students to enter Phoenix Union high
schools, compared to two “feeder”
districts in Tempe.

Lewis says she is a
strong proponent of K-12 education,
meaning that students remain under the
auspices of a single district throughout
their pubic school education. She called
K-12 education “seamless” and noted that
Arizona State University President
Michael Crow espouses an even broader
approach to combine education from
pre-school through high school under a
single district.

Lewis is not bound to the
idea of a single high school district in
Tempe, however.

The 162-square-mile Tempe
Union district might be better served if
it were broken into several smaller
“unified” districts, Lewis said. One
immediate benefit would be to have
school administrators closer to the
elementary, middle and high schools in
their districts, she said.

“I would call it a
dinosaur,” she said of the current
system of separate elementary school
districts operating independently of the
high school district.

“I believe it has
exceeded its usefulness,” she said.

A recent university
study, The Condition of School
Administration in Arizona: 2005,
found that “most
indicators suggest that the state of
public education in Arizona is dismal”
and noted that unification might
be a step toward improving things.

However, authors Arnold Danzig of Arizona
State University, Walter Delecki of
Northern Arizona University and David
Quinn of the University of Arizona,
predicted resistance to unification in
some quarters.

“District Unification
District unification has been a
consideration at the state level for at
least the past 30 years. Conversations
about district unification would appear
to be less about spending and more about
curriculum alignment, communication
among various levels of schooling,
difficulties for children in various
transition points, and the potential
impact on student learning,” the study
noted.

However, “the history of
district consolidation and unification
voting in the state does not indicate a
great deal of local or community support
for these plans,” the report said.

It questioned whether
there would be savings by combining
districts to avoid duplication of
administrative costs.

“While some believe that
district unification means lower
administrative costs and higher quality
education, there is little evidence to
support these claims … [L]arger
districts generally pay administrators
more at all levels than do smaller
districts,” the study noted.

“Yet, cost efficiency is
not the sole criterion by which the
benefits of district unification, or any
other reform, can be measured. Quality
educational experiences for children and
service to families, schools, and
communities offer equally important
standards to consider,” the study
concluded.

For more on the study,
visit http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/AEPI/AEPI_2005_annual_report.htm